YMMV / Battle for Terra

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Are the council Obstructive Bureaucrats (due to spending most of the time debating rather than taking action despite the failing nature of their starship) or Reasonable Authority Figures (knowing that their hawkish mindset led to a devastating war along with eliminating a potential ally who would be a boon to their colonization effort)? However by the time Hemmer revealed that the Ark has only two months of life support left, it is not clear whether he was sidelined during his arguments with the council, kept secret by the council to prevent total chaos among the crews, or deliberately withheld from everyone except him and his pool of supporters.
• Animation Age Ghetto: This trope is likely one of the reasons, combined with the nonexistent marketing, that the movie failed so hard financially. It's a fairly grim and serious movie, where neither side is entirely in the wrong - the fact that it's animated is the only "family" thing about it.
• Anvilicious: The main human ship is called the Ark, and the smaller ships are shaped like crosses. Subtle.
  • How do you really drive home an anti-war message in the anvilliest way? By having three whole planets blown up in the backstory.
• Cult Classic: Remembered very fondly to this day by the thirty people on Earth who saw it in theaters.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The movie's complete failure at the box office is even more ironic when a movie with almost the exact same plot held the record for highest-grossing film OF ALL TIME for nearly a decade.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: How the heck did this get a PG rating with a D-bomb, casual threats of genocide on both ends, and space whale gore?
  • Going further, the film has (human) male nudity (not frontal, but still), several dead (alien) bodies on slabs and hanging in body bags in the worst abattoir-like display possible. And to top it off the on-screen deaths by decompression of no less than four people, one of whom was a protagonist's father, and another was Jim.

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